Split off from the topic New material definitions for three crop areas in Europe.
I've been looking at creating a high res/modern texture replacement for tropical.png&tropical-alt2.png, as well as trying to create a approach/workflow for extracting textures and processing to make the textures look good in-sim. I'll document what I found in the wiki eventually.
Topical-alt.png exists but appears to be a lot more for tropical islands (multiple coconut trees, banana trees etc.). It's also 1024x1024. The modern high quality textures like coniferous-alt.png or deciduous-alt.png are 2048.
4 unique trees in tropical-alt2.png. The texture is only 512x512. The rest are mirrored copies. This seems to be more a tropical forest/rainforest tree set(?). :
Q1: The 3rd is a palm tree of some sort. Can anyone identify the the other 3 trees? There seem to be 4 spare slots, so other tree species that would fit in a generic tree set might be useful if I can find images.
The type of forest tree will do, I can look up the species. For the 4th tree, even a non-tropical tree that with a CC4 photo that could be recoloured might help. I don't know about identifying tree species from around the world (not learned the visual characteristics to differentiate plant species before, as much as much as I appreciate nature).
----
Replacement for the 3rd tree (Palm):
I don't know what the small set of green leaves represents. I was able to find this CC4 [1] photo on wikimedia commons. It seems the camera/filters/post-processing gave the leaves a yellowy look:
One of the trees seems to have a small cluster of leaves - or something. So I guess these are the correct species. I copied the cluster to one of leaves to one of the other trees which were in sharper focus. I made holes in some of the leaf clums, as this plays to the strengths of the rendering technique that does texture detail fast - and as trees with leaf clumps that have gaps (maybe also due to strong branching) seem preferred in other texture sheets.
I used a combination of the fuzzy select tool, and the free select tool with high zoom to separate the tree (and shorten it removing the shadow on the trunk. After that the Colors->map->Rotate colors tool worked incredibly well to recolour the photo - to remove the yellowy look, and match the types of bright colours in the texture sheet.
Q2: Does anyone know what causes the mismatch in the colours when viewed in GIMP compared with in-sim under midday light conditions? It seems colours have been shifted to blue, or look more muted. Is it just a perceptual adjustment to the perceived illuminant in the scene inside the sim? Is the current "look" correct - is there a specific setting like daylight or overcast to check? Is there an adjustment that needs to be made to get the perceived colours to match the GiMP colours - like using the colour temperature tool - what is the target colour 6500k, what is a good colour temp for an overcast image like this one? I guess colour temp doesn't matter so much if the approach is mainly overwriting the (often bad) photo lighting/colours and setting the desired colours by rotating colours and adjusting saturation/intensity.
These are successive alterations of colours using the rotate colours tool. They were done at noon at VTSP by modifying the block containing Rainforest south-east-asia.xml. In the end, for the last one, I tried increasing saturation for the greens and yellow to get more vibrant colours in-sim:
Q3. The semi-transparent fringes seem to take on a whitish hue when they are viewed against the sky - see this image - it's visible both in the new set and the old trees. This might be due to them having a blue/white colour due to missing with the sky in the photo. Is this why, and is there a quick fix in GIMP?
Kind regards